Page 70 of Underground Prince

One guy gave me the side-eye, his jowls flapping. “Let’s get on with the game, shall we? She can chatter to herself.”

The woman nodded, turning a fifth card in front of her.

There were no face cards on the table, only numbers and mostly spades, but it seemed to really piss off the guy across from me. He was dressed in a business suit, his face red and shining as if his tie were strangling him.

“Fold,” he said, spittle flying on the f as he slammed his hand down on his two cards.

The man to the left of him, skinny, bald and spectacled, also folded.

“All mine,” Jowls said, raking the small pile of chips toward him. “Now Miss Chirpy can play.”

I’d never been eyed hungrily before, but all three men were salivating, waiting for me to buy in. I was bait and I knew it. A flounder in a sea of sharks.

“Like I said, I’m waiting for someone, but I can leave.” I mumbled the last part, recognizing the storm cloud passing over Jowls’s face.

“Your preferred drink, yes?” The ruby lady was back, setting a short glass filled with clear liquid and ice in front of me. I sipped, discovering it was a vodka soda. Not my drink, but Kai was likely going off what most girls he knew drank, or the typical stereotype of a girl, or who knew what since he wasn’t even fucking here, just calling in a drink order for me in the basement of a Chinese restaurant.

“Do you know where Kai is?” I asked after I nodded my thanks.

“I do not,” she said, bending low and saying into my ear, “but you have been taken care of.” She produced a clear tray filled with a few rows of poker chips and set it in front of me.

“That’s…” My purse fell off my lap. “That’s like a thousand dollars worth of chips you just gave me.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “That is the buy-in. It has been taken care of, like I said. Your Kai.”

“What?”

The woman at the table—the dealer—shushed me. “You are the small blind. Make the bet.”

“No, no, no, no.” I stood up, then stooped down, fumbling on the ground for my purse. “There’s been a mistake. Kai—”

“Lady, if I hear that name one more time I am going to spit on you.”

I was so shocked by the threat that I gawked at Jowls.

“I mean it,” Jowls said. “Now stay still and play.”

“But—”

“From what I’m hearing, it ain’t even your goddamn money, it’s Pie’s or whoever the fuck he is.” He flapped his hand at my empty chair. “So siddown and spend all his cash for standing you up.”

I sat down.

He folded his arms on the table, waiting serenely for the dealer.

“Small blind,” the dealer-woman said, reminding me again.

“Ah…” I dug my teeth into my bottom lip as I grazed the row of chips in front of me, frantically flashing back to my hours of online videos.

“Blinds are ten-twenty,” Spectacles said across from me. When that didn’t work, he added, “Ten is the small blind. Twenty is the big.”

So I had to put in ten dollars. Easy enough. I threw a ten dollar chip into the center of the table, appearing official.

And thus the game went. I played conservatively, mostly folding, afraid to go any higher but focusing like hell on the players around me, getting my cues from them, taking words right out of their mouths and using them for my own, like “check” and “call,” and my personal favorite, “ah, Jesus fuck.”

I’d spectated and researched enough to know how it worked to pass on a hand but not fold (check), or to match the person’s previous bet in order to stay in the game (call). But the cards were jumbled in front of me, hearts blurring into diamonds, red into black, and I forgot what a flush was, or a straight, or a full house. I had a ton of money in front of me and I was desperate not to lose it. Kai had more twisted pleasures than I ever gave him credit for, and I was suffocating.

But I couldn’t let them see it. Spectacles licked his lips as he stared at my chips when he thought I wasn’t paying attention; Jowls was still eyeing me on the side, amused at my idiocy and waiting for me to prove it; and the angry man, the one who folded with saliva spray almost more than I did, was suspiciously quiet. Two other men sat down, one young, maybe my age, the other as old as my late grandfather, and they remained mysteries.

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